The writer’s life raft – the SVO sentence structure
You’re working on your next business document and you’ve become tangled in your own words.
Happens all the time to people trying to organize their thoughts in writing. Don’t get frustrated. There’s an architectural blueprint that will show you the way out. It’s called the subject/verb/object sentence structure, or SVO for short. Build your sentence using this prescription and you probably won’t go wrong, for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s a simple, easy-to-follow structure, which is exactly what you (and your readers) need when dealing with business information that’s getting dense.
Second, the SVO structure accords with how the human brain works. People naturally look for the actor (i.e., the subject) and for cause-and-effect. This is how we experience reality. If you have an actor, the actor is expected to take some kind of action, and that action is your verb. The thing they act upon is your object.
Very simple.
Here’s another way to view this architectural model of the sentence. Use key words that answer:
- Who or what? The actor (subject)
- Does, did or will do what? The action (action verb)
- To what or to whom? The receiver of the action (object)
Follow this prescription and you’re creating an action pattern.
Stuck on your next sentence? Default to SVO, the most natural and readable construction in the English language.
If you’re writing about a company, treat it as a person – a living entity. People are more interesting than objects because they act, they are complicated, they have motives and agendas.
So what does an SVO sentence look and read like? Here’s a few examples with the subject in bold, the verb in italics and the object underscored.
Our customer relations department has transformed itself into the most flamboyant operation of its kind in the retail business.
The renewable energy business has matured into the high-revving-engine of the U.S. economy.
Ted Turner revolutionized the television news business when he launched CNN in 1980.
As you can see, the final SVO sentence contained two verbs and two objects, a kind of double-barrel version of the construction.
No comments:
Post a Comment